First Ever Avengers Fic
Title: Red
Summary: Dreykov's daughter, Sao Paulo, and the hospital fire. In which Natasha wonders if she will ever be able to wash that much red from her ledger, or the blood from between the lines in the palms of her hands. MCU.
Warnings: mild language, dark, mature themes, and strong violence including violence against children, possibly borderline M, so tread carefully
Disclaimer: Not mine. Except for the mistakes. Those belong to me.
Inspired by Loki's taunts behind the walls of his cell in the first Avengers movie. Natasha's reaction, although possibly exaggerated to trick Loki into revealing his plan, could simply not be ignored.
Red
November 22, 1984. Volgograd, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The baby was red and wrinkled. The mother's ragged breathing scraped against the worn, crumbling walls of the soiled maternity ward. She had bled and screamed, giving birth, and her throat felt raw. The baby wailed now, weakly flailing its arms, a child whose first impression of the earth was one of pain, sweat, tears, and dingy, gray cement walls, and the pallid, skull-like face of its mother. Its skin was covered in sticky blood.
"Natalia." The mother gasped. Her husband's hand was warm and hard on her shoulder. "I will call her Natalia."
December 24, 2003. Odense, Denmark.
The little girl was still smiling when the Natasha's bullet went through her forehead. Her eyes had not yet had a chance to express surprise at finding Natasha standing silhouetted against the lights of the Christmas tree. Her lips had not yet opened, throat not yet begun to form a scream, mind not yet thought to register fear or awareness of her impending death.
Her eyes were blue. She was missing one of her front teeth, dark hole hiding between her thin, pink lips.
The floor creaked as a man rounded the corner, following his daughter with a matching smile stretching across his lips. He paused when he saw the small, crumpled body lying on the braided rug. He looked up and seemed unable to correlate Natasha's silent figure and smoking gun with that of his dead daughter's body. His eyes met Natasha's when she pressed the trigger again, bullet squeezing from the barrel of her silenced Glock 26 with a sound almost like a sneeze and marking his forehead with a black spot in exactly the same position it had his daughter's, one and a half inches below the hairline.
His body hit the carpet with a muffled thump. The brightly wrapped parcels in his arms scattered on the floor beside to him. One, a gift bag, dislodged its purple tissue paper over his chest, revealing the delicate hand of a china doll with yellow curls of hair. Blood slowly leaked from the hole in his forehead and trickled down the side of his nose behind his glasses.
The milk from the glass the little girl had been carrying soaked into her baby blue bathrobe. Brightly frosted cookies lay crumbled on her stomach. A gingerbread man stared at Natasha with mournful gumdrop eyes, its left leg broken. For a fraction of a second Natasha wondered who they were for before she recalled, the memory emerging from an uneasy dream halfway between sleep and consciousness, the jolly, rosy-cheeked Saint Nikolaos. Blood had begun to tangle in the little girl's blond hair.
She was perhaps seven or eight years old. At that age Natasha had already had her first kill. A girl named Vasilisa who'd had dust colored hair and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and slept on her right side with her knees drawn up to touch her chest, two beds down from Natasha. She had attempted to steal Natasha's apple during lunch. Fresh fruit was rare in the Red Room.
The little girl's hand lay next to her head. Already tendrils of blood were beginning to lick the white skin, palm upward, fingers curled, nails painted with purple polish and sparkles. Natasha slid her gun smoothly into her belt and turned noiselessly on her toes.
It was snowing outside. And cold. Natasha pulled her hood up and zippered her jacket over her chin to guard her face against the harsh wind that tore at her hair and skin. The bells of the church had just begun to toll, clambering against the stone walls of the surrounding buildings, and Natasha didn't bother to wonder what was her name.
*****
"I'm sure you must be weary, dear, with soaring up so high;
Will you rest upon my little bed?" said the spider to the fly.
"There are pretty curtains drawn around, the sheets are fine and thin,
And if you like to rest awhile, I'll snugly tuck you in."
"O no, no," said the little fly, "for I've often heard it said,
They never, never wake again, who sleep upon your bed."
"The Spider and the Fly" by Mary Howitt
July 29, 2008. Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The air was hot and heavy and seemed to stick to her lungs as she breathed, tickling her nostrils with the smell of gasoline and cigarette smoke. Her hair was matted to her forehead, covered in a thin film of sweat which enclosed the rest of her body like a shroud, silk sheets sticking to her bare legs as if with glue, collecting under her armpits in pools, and dripping tepidly down the back of her neck, making it difficult to distinguish from the blood that oozed over her chest and arms.
Smoothly, delicately, precisely she rolled the heavy body of Fredric Delacroix off of her and slipped out of the bed, bare feet landing lightly on the soft carpet. She swiped at a lock of hair that had fallen into her eye, leaving a trail of blood on her forehead.
Colorful, rustic landscapes of Brazilian mountains watched her from the wall. A fly buzzed against the closed window that overlooked the city, masked in white lace drapes that filtered the harsh sunlight lingering outside.
She wiped the blade of her knife on the already blood-soaked sheets that had once been pure white. Blood dribbled down her stomach, ringing her navel and running toward her thigh. She crossed the room swiftly to the open bathroom door which she didn't bother shutting as she reached for the faucet. She turned the water all the way to cold, leaving bloody fingerprints on the shining metal handles.
Natasha specialized in intimate kills, luring her prey expertly with a coy look between flickering eyelashes, a caress just so with the tip of her fingers over a jaw dusted with whiskers, only to be caught blissfully unaware in her sticky web and feel the keen sting of her bite.
She placed her blade on the ledge of the sink. After washing her hands, carefully scraping the blood out of her fingernails, she grabbed a wad of paper towels and wet them under the running water. She mopped up Delacroix's blood that stained her bare breasts and stomach, turning the towels pink. The cool water felt good on her hot skin. She tossed the towels into the garbage bin and wet another wad, dabbing at the back of her neck.
She tossed cold water over her face, not shutting her eyelids and feeling her mascara sting her eyes. She should have worn waterproof makeup. It had already been running because of the sweat.
She looked in the mirror above the sink that reflected the marbled tile of the wall behind her, the mosaic fish with scales of blue and green hanging behind her head. She had never had much patience for flippant decoration. Wasting time and resources on ornamentation was an abstract concept for her, crafted for people with faraway interests and lives.
Many things were abstract concepts. Mother. Father. Friend. Regret. Affection. All there had ever been, vibrant and inerasable was the concept of enemy. Her face looked smooth and unconcerned reflected back at her in the mirror. It seemed to her now, fleetingly, that the enemy bore her same hair and eyes, assumed the identical curve of jaw and narrow cheekbones. She hadn't even flinched, feeling her blade break his skin and burry itself further into his chest while he heaved and gagged, eyes widening under her careful gaze.
The sharp crack of knuckles on the door recoiled through the room like a gunshot. Her knife was back in her hand. The leather handle felt slick in her wet palm. The hall door opened into the bedroom. Natasha heard the sound of polite footsteps padding on the thick carpet. She heard the gasp of shock and horror as whoever it was discovered Delacroix's body lying on the bed in a pool of blood of vivid scarlet. Natasha stepped around the bathroom doorway and chucked the knife in one fluid motion, a mere flick of her wrist, tossing end over end in a neat spiral and embedding itself in the copper-colored throat of the maid standing in the doorway, eyes puddles of dark chocolate and wide in terror, not even looking at Natasha.
Blood spattered the maid's white apron and pimply cheeks. A strangled sound issued from her open mouth as she choked on the blood that burbled up her throat and out of her lips. She dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut and Natasha crossed the room in three strides, stepping over the body of the maid who was still twitching reflexively on the carpet, and snatching hold of the nob of the door that led to the hallway to hastily swing it shut, more conscious of the fact she was still naked than the girl's body leaking blood in front of the open door. The maid's cart was sitting in the hallway, clean sheets and towels folded on top. They must have forgotten to hang the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. A rookie mistake. She should have known better.
Natasha recovered her knife from the throat of the girl without looking at her still open eyes. She might have been sixteen. She went back to the bathroom, realizing she'd left the faucet running.
Natasha had seduced her first mark at sixteen. She'd shot him in the back before he'd even finished taking off his trousers. A clean kill, cleaner than today's. No collateral damage. Natasha liked things neat.
She shut off the water and wiped the knobs carefully. She padded back over to the side of the bed, where Delacroix's blood was creeping over the sheets in rivulets emulating the tide of an ocean soaking into the sand, ebb and flow rushing in her ears like her breathing, chest rising and falling with the sound of sawing wood. He was lying chest down on the bed. His face was pressed into her pillow. Had he still been breathing he might have been able to smell a trace of her perfume on the pillow. She recalled the feel of his hairy chest, sticky with sweat, against her own soft skin and repressed a shudder. She was glad he was dead.
She picked her dress off the floor and yanked it over her head, struggling to pull the tight and stretchy material over her still-wet skin. She ran her hands through her hair to flatten it, slipped her knife back into its holster around her thigh, and fastened her strappy sandals back around her ankles. She popped the mint that had been on his pillow into her mouth to wash out the taste of ash on her tongue. She hated men who smoked. Her gums felt like sandpaper.
Clasping her diamond choker back around her throat she crossed the room to the door, six-inch heels sinking into the carpet. She avoided stepping in the blood that leached onto the floor from the maid's throat. She was young. Maybe sixteen. Natasha had already been doing a job a week by then.
The lock clicked like the cocking of a gun as she stepped into the hall and shut the door firmly behind her. She wondered how long it would take them to find the bodies and rang for the elevator, coolly observing the elevator boy with tan skin, gold and white uniform, and eyes that strayed to the diamond pendant nestled in her cleavage displayed by the low neckline of her dress. He was young, too. She wondered if he'd known the maid. Surely he saw her in the morning and through her rounds, knew her well enough to exchange nods and smiles, perhaps addressed each other by first names.
The sun beat down on the top of her head and burned the pale skin exposed in the part of her hair. It reflected off the mirror-like windows of the skyscrapers around her. Taxi's screeched and honked their horns in the streets. The sidewalks were clogged with vibrant clothes, faces, and conversations, street sounds and jabbering voices blending in the back of her head until in formed a cadence in which she walked, giving her grace enough to ignore the pulsing beat of her heart beneath her breast.
She'd keep the necklace. Delacroix had insisted, after all.
She peeled off the sidewalk into an alley where she'd left her drawstring knapsack with a change of clothes and a granola bar under a loose brick in the wall of the drycleaners. She downed the granola bar in two swallows, squinting against the sunlight gleaming off the lid of a dumpster bulging with black trash bags. The alley stank of garbage and urine. She wished she'd packed a bottle of water. She could still smell the rusty metal scent of Delacroix's blood in her nose.
She was pulling on a pair of shorts when she heard the crackle of a pebble behind her. In an instant, she'd turned, knife firmly in her palm, already raised to shoulder height. Sweat had again begun to slip down her temples, over her jaw and off her chin. It hung in a bead off the tip of her nose.
A man wearing a slick jumpsuit of black leather stared at her levelly at the end of the alley, blond hair erect and forehead shining with sweat in the sunlight, eyes a mixture of gray and blue and green like the murky water of the Rio Grande. For a moment all she could think was whether or not he was warm in all that black leather. She registered like a shot of a pistol that he was carrying a quiver and bow, arrow of which was trained on her nose.
Well damn she thought, clearly and precisely, and pondered if it was the same thing her own victims thought, before they felt the bite of her blade or heard the crack of her gun, if they ever had any time to think at all. She wondered if she might pitch her knife between his eyes before he let his arrow fly and found with no real surprise that she really didn't care to try.
His eyes left hers for a moment, lingering over her left hand, which was still clutching the fly of her denim shorts. She wondered how long he had been watching, first waiting for her to come back, later watching her undress.
"Well," he said, voice bouncing across the sultry Brazilian air. "I'll admit. You've got spunk. I like that in a woman."
She smirked, admiring the taught, sculpted muscles in his biceps and the way the sunlight glinted off the well-filed point of his arrow and sheen of sweat above his upper lip.
"Let me guess, they call you Robin Hood."
"Close." He matched her smile, eyes joining hers again in a way that told her with assurance that he knew exactly what they called her. His fingers plucked the string of his bow as delicately as he might those of a guitar. "But not quite."
******
March 2, 2009. Yerevan, Armenia.
Natasha met Barton in the alley between an ancient stone library and a Pizza Hut. Her heart was pattering against her ribs but she wasn't even breathing hard. Neither was Barton.
He nodded to her briskly and she answered him with a nod of her own. She didn't have to ask him whether or not Namazi was now dead. He adjusted the buckle of his quiver over his shoulder.
"Any luck locating the package?" he asked her.
"No," she tried not to let her frustration seep through her voice. The chill air prickled against her skin and breath steamed from her mouth, rising and dissipating into the air in front of her face. "He can't have already planted it."
Barton nodded in agreement, "We've been watching him too carefully -"
His words were cut off by a rumble that rapidly grew into a roaring, crackling explosion that rang through the streets and rebounded off the patchwork of buildings both of the old and new world. Fragmented screams erupted down the street, carried on the dry, cold air.
"Damn," said Barton, word leaving his mouth with a puff of white breath.
Package delivered. Natasha and Barton had been partners for almost a year now. By now there was no longer any need for words or exchange of looks to know he'd kicked into a sprint right beside her, both headed toward the direction of the explosion.
Cars and trucks skidded to a stop in the road. Pedestrians were running, some toward, and some away from the hum of chaos coming from down the street. Natasha saw smoke rise above the tops of buildings, blending with the murky gray clouds that clogged the sky. Skeletal trees that would no doubt bloom lush in the spring lined the sidewalk and reached their naked branches up to the sky like the imploring arms of the dead.
The crowd of people was growing thicker and more animated. Clattering footsteps pounded on the pavement splintered with potholes and cracks from the past winter. Barton ran two steps in front of Natasha, pushing off shoulders and squeezing through gaps in the throng. Natasha slid neatly after him, using the spaces created in his wake for her path. Sirens wailed in the distance. Her eyes zeroed in on individual aspects of the crowd, the red traffic light reflecting off a man's glasses, the freckles covering a woman's nose, a silver zipper of a blue windbreaker, the dark curls of hair on a child's olive forehead. She could smell the smoke on the air now.
Barton skidded to a stop in front of her and she dodged so she wouldn't ram into his back. He'd made his way to the front of the crowd, blocked by a wrought iron fence marked with a wooden sign reading Հիվանդանոց. Billowing smoke and flames leapt from the crumbling brick windows and walls of the building before them. Distant figures darted out of the double doors. Alarms screamed over their heads. Natasha could see uniformed policemen shouldering their way through the crowd.
"What was it?"
"A bomb."
"My God."
Snatches of panicked conversation flurried through the air and drifted into Natasha's ears. She was unable to focus on any one voice, any one face, sound or feeling.
"Looks like it hit the children's wing."
The words were spoken in Russian but Natasha could tell, by the way Barton's eyes widened, that he had understood just a clearly as she had.
Her foot broke forward without her consent. Her fist wound around a bar of the low fence and she vaulted neatly over it rather than waste time looking for a gate. Her feet landed on the yellowed lawn. It seemed to her that she could see a dead child lying in front of her, at the base of the hospital's brick wall, empty hand lying open on a braided carpet.
Oh, but she'll never find me here. And if you let me stay I'll keep house for you. I'll wash and sew and sweep and cook.
She heard Barton's heavy footfalls land on the ground as he followed her over the fence and sprinted with her toward the hospital.
"Romanoff, wait -"
Natasha did not pause to heed Barton's voice, but pelted up the flight of stairs that led to the front doors, jostling panicked health-workers and patients fleeing from the building, coughing and crying and eyes empty and haunted.
Inside there was pandemonium. Doctors and nurses rushed through the halls, some carrying litters or pushing wheelchairs. Sirens keened in the background. Smoke clogged the halls. Screams of pain and fear crashed against Natasha's ears. She heard the sound of tinkling glass and saw the clear contents of an IV flask spill across the floor, spreading through the cracks of the linoleum floor like the edges of a puzzle.
Natasha's eyes zeroed in on the door marked Սանդուղք and flung it open to reveal a flight of stairs, on which more people were clattering down, arms thrown over their mouths to stop themselves from inhaling the swelling smoke, some nursing fresh injuries, others old.
Natasha pounded up the stairs against the tide, jostled by shoulders and palms, sucking in her stomach and pressing against the rough brick wall to allow a stretcher bearing an elderly woman to be carried by.
Barton was still behind her, obstructed by the crowd blocking the stairwell. The smoke was getting thicker. Natasha's eyes were streaming.
The door was open on the third floor, letting in more people with more obvious wounds onto the stairs, blood streaming from a forehead and a shoulder, an arm twisted at an unnatural angle, hands carrying an unconscious, blood-covered child. Natasha pushed her way through the door and broke away from the mob, shoes smacking flatly against the floor as she darted down the hallway.
Black smoke made it difficult to see. She could hear more screaming now, sobbing, wailing, yelling. She saw yellow and red flames flickering ahead like rippling water and she ran faster, breath scraping up her throat painfully.
"Romanoff! This isn't our job! What the hell do you think you're doing?" Barton's footsteps pounded on the polished linoleum floor as he caught up to her. His fingers seized Natasha's wrist and swung her roughly right about to face him.
She used her own momentum against him and instinctively the heel of her hand found his forehead. Her knee came up to burry itself in his in his abdomen. She twisted and yanked her arm all in one motion and his fingers slid away from her wrist. He reacted in kind, grunt of pain seeping through his lips from the blow of her knee even as his own open palm swung upward toward her face. She ducked and he took advantage of her distraction, fingers closing again on her forearm, biting into her flesh.
His eyes found, caught, and held her own, steely gray that burned orange from the reflecting light of the fire. She didn't know who he was. She didn't know who she, herself, was. Smoke swirled around his head like the halo of a demon. She became aware of the heat, a pulsing, living thing that pressed against her chest and threatened to suffocate her. Natasha thought hell must be as red and hot as this.
And then, above the roaring flames, sirens, and distant screams, above it all, clear, and plaintive rose the keening cry of a child. Barton's fingers loosed around Natasha's arm. She whipped back around, eyes searching the thick smoke. She felt Barton's heavy, warm body behind her. Their footsteps beat a matching rhythm upon the floor, moving seamlessly as one.
Natasha clattered through a half-demolished door into a large ward lined with beds. The far wall was already crumbled and licked with flames. Half the ceiling had been blown off in the explosion, letting in a stream of cold air from outside that did war with the smoke and flame, swirling where they met in a whirlpool of black and white and red.
"Get out!" Barton yelled between wracking coughs to a woman wearing a nurse's uniform, eyes wet and round, untangling a child from its bedsheets with shaking fingers. "Take him and get out!"
Natasha inhaled and felt her own lungs clog with smoke, gasping and retching for nonexistent oxygen. She felt heat on her face as she ran to another bed and bundled the waiting child into her arms. The child clung to her neck with wiry arms. She could hear its shrill screaming in her ears.
The far wall collapsed under the raging fire onto a row of beds. Natasha had not been able to see through the smoke whether or not they had held more children, now buried in burning rubble. Barton was carrying his own child, its face buried in his chest.
"Romanoff! Let's go!" He bellowed to be heard over the roaring, hungry flames.
Natasha turned to leave but motion caught the corner of her eye. She saw the sheets move on a bed close to the fire, churning and twisting as they fought to disgorge the child within them. The child rolled off the bed and landed on the floor. It struggled to its feet.
Natasha stumbled forward to meet it, seeing gentle confusion in its strangely fearless brown eyes. It seemed to Natasha that she could see herself reflected in those eyes, a distant black figure with red hair that matched the angry flames. Red and yellow light rippled across the child's pale, innocent face.
"Romanoff -"
The flames consumed the child, shielding its writhing body from Natasha's eyes. The heat spiked on the point of a knife until Natasha could feel her cheeks burning. The child in her arm was squirming and shrieking. Natasha was unable to tell if the wetness on her neck was from the child's hot tears or blood.
Natasha remembered abruptly that her parents had died in a fire. It was a thought she could not remember ever thinking before. It was something she should have forgotten long ago. Something that should have died with her when Natalia Romanova had died and Black Widow had been reborn from the ashes. Her past was a puzzle, some pieces were faded and torn, others jammed into spots they didn't quite fit, still others missing entirely. But it was true. In a flash she knew it was true and it seemed to her that she could hear their distant, unfamiliar voices wailing, carried on the same noxious smoke that brought the screams of dying children.
"Romanoff we - can't -" Barton gasped, fingers touching her arm again, much softer this time. "There's nothing -" She didn't know whether or not he had seen the child vanish under the flames.
The fire mounted and reared like a vicious beast, swallowing everything in its path. She tore away, dragged her wrist from Barton's fingers, and tumbled back out of the ward. The ceiling above them creaked and swayed. There was a splintering, grinding sound and a beam of wood detached from the rafters, bringing with it a shower of glowing red embers like fluttering confetti or colorful fireworks.
Natasha heard Barton grunt in pain as the beam collapsed on his shoulder. Flames licked up the wood, sizzling angrily as it stroked his hair. He was hunched over, using his body to shield the child in his arms. Natasha sprang forward, arm loosening around her own child in order to curl around the beam of wood. She felt the flesh of her hands and forearm scald as she yanked at the beam at the same time Barton hoisted himself back to his feet.
Smoke swirled and flames buckled in the air. Natasha and Barton sprinted flat out down the hallway, unable to see from side to side because of the smoke, dodging obstacles of collapsed walls and charred medical equipment, stretchers, broken bedposts, and shattered glass that reflected the crimson flames. All Natasha could hear was the pained screaming of the child against her chest, rattling inside her ribs, small and thin and delicate, writhing in her arms as though it wished for her to release it into the air. Tongues of flame flailed in the hall behind them and fumbled for Natasha's flying heels. They reached the staircase that was now empty and hallow, walls charred black. The stairs rattled and clanged as they pelted downward. The banister swayed dangerous. The door was eaten behind them by leaping flames.
They clattered into the smoke bathed lobby, still swarming with medical personnel. Firefighters were streaming through the doors, wearing opaque masks that hid their faces from the smoke and dragging thick hoses that looked like heaving, twisting snakes.
Natasha followed Barton's wide shoulders, on which his quiver of arrows still clung, lopsided now as one of the buckles had been knocked loose. Some of the fletchings had caught fire and burned away, leaving nothing but the spidery skeleton of the feathers. He pushed past a pack of firemen and tripped down the stairs. Natasha followed, rush of cold air stinging her scorched face like an open palm slap. She blinked in the sudden brightness caused by the absence of the smoke, even though the sky was still overcast.
Blinking, whirling lights that belonged to the emergency vehicles scattered on the lawn twisted across her vision and disoriented her. Police and firemen and medical personnel were scattered about, all running, all shouting. Sirens keened, now mere background noise, blending in with the shrieking of the child into Natasha's ears, the crackling of the burning building behind them, the gushing of the water from the fire hoses, and prattle of voices from the watching pedestrians.
Natasha veered away from Barton, approaching a dazed looking doctor with soot in his hair. He reacted to her and the child in her arms mechanically, reaching up with tender, nimble hands to relieve her of the screaming, trembling child who did not want to let go. Its fingernails left deep welts on Natasha's neck as the doctor pulled it away. She was glad its eyes were screwed shut in its terror and pain. She didn't want to see herself reflected in its black, mirror-like pupils.
Barton was still carrying his own child, which looked stiff and motionless in his arms. His eyes were dark and hard, almost lost. A woman carrying a red cross bag rushed over to him, but Barton shook his head. Natasha could tell by the deep lines etched by the sides of his mouth that the child was dead. He seemed reluctant to let go of the body.
Natasha pulled herself away from the crowd. She felt herself drift away on the smoke rising into the air, floating far above the piecemeal stone and cement buildings and surrounding fields of dead grass, mingling with the leaden clouds above them. Her throat and lungs ached, scraped raw and parched by the smoke. Ash, the smell and taste of it, was all around her. Her fingers were red and covered with shining burns.
The grass crackled under her knees. She could not recall making the decision to kneel. She did not know how to pray.
The frozen ground felt hard and cool, seeping through the scorched fabric of her spandex leggings. She tangled her fingers in it and closed her eyes, breathing deeply the cold, crisp air that stung her lungs and throat and dried the tears on her lashes to a sticky, grainy film. The white-capped Caucuses cast a shadow over the lawn and the near parking lot speckled with cars with rusty license plates, all covered with the faint, flickering glow of orange flame and dark, drifting clouds of smoke.
One of the girls in the Red Room had grown her left index fingernail long and filed it to a point sharp enough to slice her victims' throats. She had once almost speared Natasha's eye during a sparring session. Natasha had snapped the girl's shin as simply and effortlessly as cracking a branch over her knee. Her yells had echoed across the courtyard until they'd been silenced by the heel of the warden's shoe carefully crushing her windpipe. Natasha had been made to suffer a week without food afterward. Mercy, like love, was for children.
Natasha had been eleven.
Natasha heard the grass crunch under Barton's shoes as he approached, unnaturally keen eyesight routing her out from between the press of frantic bodies.
"We need to go."
She looked up at him from the ground. Natasha wondered where he'd put the dead child. The left arm of his uniform had been torn. The skin exposes beneath it was an angry red.
Natasha absentmindedly gripped her wrist, massaging her skin. She had never understood why they had been cuffed in at night. To prevent escape? It was the most natural explanation except for the fact that Natasha could not remember ever actually wanting to leave.
"Romanoff, we should go."
The tips of his hair were singed black, face stained with soot, shoulders dusted with white ash like the snow-tipped mountains looming above them. The air was clean and cool. Natasha tasted smoke and blood in her mouth. She could still smell the burned hair of the child she had carried out of the hospital to safety.
"Dammit, Romanoff!" Barton's voice exploded from his lips, fist clanged against the metal post of the fence surrounding the parking lot. "We can't stay here."
She looked away, back to her fingers tangled in the yellow grass. The nail of her middle finger had almost entirely torn away. Blood slipped down her finger and caught in the wrinkles of her knuckles. She turned her hand over, tracing the thin stripes of blood that wound through the lines in her palm.
"Dammit!" Barton yelled again. Fist clanging against the post again. Natasha wondered if he was remembering the dead weight of the child in his arms. She wondered if the child's body had been warm or cold by the time he'd relinquished it. She wondered how many dead children Clint Barton had ever seen, touched, held, if he had ever mourned any of them before now.
The cold air embraced her shoulders like the arms of a lover and silently, methodically she named them in her head. Gerardo Maldonado. Frederic Delacroix. Jillian Underwood. Robald Charleston. The old woman wrapped in a knitted shawl who smelt of peppermint and Tabaco. Annemarie Donati. The homeless man with the gray hat and dirty nails. The two nameless henchmen in navy suits with matching ties. Melanie. The woman in green. Imogen Wilkerson. The taxi driver. Dreykov. Adam Riley. Rosa Burke. Vasilisa. She remembered all their faces if not their names, all their eyes, all their voices. The same voices that crowded into her ears and blended into those of innocent, ignorant pedestrians on the streets, the same eyes that watched her from behind newspapers and through windows in passing cars, out of mirrors set into cracked, faded wallpaper.
By now she could not remember the exact number.
"Natasha?" Something in Barton's voice changed, became a coarse whisper more poisonous than any curse. His rough fingers touched her shoulder, gently, almost tentatively as though he was afraid she would strike him. She realized she was trembling. She wondered how much of her own blood she would have to shed to wash away her multitude of sins, etched into her arms in dull pink scars and purple bruises and powder burns from her pistol.
She could no longer remember all the reasons. She wondered if there ever were any reasons. She wondered if there were even any now. She knew Barton had thought the same because she'd heard his uneven breathing at night and felt the sweat on his forehead under the beds of her fingers. She could feel his own fingers quivering on her shoulder, uniform so thin it was almost as if his flesh rested on her own.
She stared at the metal post that rose from the ground and her hand rose to touch Clint's, resting on top of the back of his fist, winding her fingers around his wrist, trying to work warmth back into his dry and cold skin.
Natasha wondered how she had known to aim waist high, why her bullet did not fly harmlessly over the little girl's head, down the hallway, and embed itself in a mirror that reflected her calm, emotionless, black-clad figure as the little girl's body dropped out of the way, pale face tarnished in blotches of red, green, blue, and yellow lights from the Christmas tree standing in the corner of the sitting room with hand-made ornaments hanging from its bows.
"I still don't know her name." Her words tasted like acid and burned on her tongue.
She hadn't even had the decency to find out her damn name.
Her fingernails dug into Clint's wrist until they broke skin and made him bleed. Clint choked on a hiss of pain but didn't pull away. Natasha wondered why he didn't pull away. His blood slithered between her fingers. She shut her eyes hard.
It seemed that the tattoo of her heart in her chest mirrored the patter of a child's feet on a carpeted floor. It was one of the many sounds, joining the wailing of a widowed wife, the gurgling of blood up a throat, the tap of point shoes on a stage, which dodged and crept through her nightmares. Natasha could feel sweat collecting on the palms of her hands and behind her knees.
She remembered now, clearly, vividly, a memory bathed in crimson light flashing off a gap-tooth smile, the sound of the child's footsteps approaching down the hall. She could remember consciously, deliberately, dismissively deciding to aim where she did, one and a half inches below the hairline.
Above them the heavily laden clouds finally expelled their pockets of snow, which blew over the dead grass, the burning hospital, the yelling firefighters, and crying children, impossible to discern from the ash that leapt from the flames. All of it floated down to cover Natasha's bent shoulders, coating her red hair in a sheet of white.
Fin
Ending Note: I've always been drawn to characters of ambiguous morality, so Natasha was a natural choice for my first story. I honestly didn't intend for this to become a "how Clint made a different call" story because it seems like everyone does those, but then my pen carried me where it willed and I ended up having very little choice in the matter.
I hope you enjoyed it. Please, consider dropping a comment if you did. Thank you for reading. (Also find this on ff.net and AO3)
Summary: Dreykov's daughter, Sao Paulo, and the hospital fire. In which Natasha wonders if she will ever be able to wash that much red from her ledger, or the blood from between the lines in the palms of her hands. MCU.
Warnings: mild language, dark, mature themes, and strong violence including violence against children, possibly borderline M, so tread carefully
Disclaimer: Not mine. Except for the mistakes. Those belong to me.
Inspired by Loki's taunts behind the walls of his cell in the first Avengers movie. Natasha's reaction, although possibly exaggerated to trick Loki into revealing his plan, could simply not be ignored.
Red
November 22, 1984. Volgograd, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The baby was red and wrinkled. The mother's ragged breathing scraped against the worn, crumbling walls of the soiled maternity ward. She had bled and screamed, giving birth, and her throat felt raw. The baby wailed now, weakly flailing its arms, a child whose first impression of the earth was one of pain, sweat, tears, and dingy, gray cement walls, and the pallid, skull-like face of its mother. Its skin was covered in sticky blood.
"Natalia." The mother gasped. Her husband's hand was warm and hard on her shoulder. "I will call her Natalia."
December 24, 2003. Odense, Denmark.
The little girl was still smiling when the Natasha's bullet went through her forehead. Her eyes had not yet had a chance to express surprise at finding Natasha standing silhouetted against the lights of the Christmas tree. Her lips had not yet opened, throat not yet begun to form a scream, mind not yet thought to register fear or awareness of her impending death.
Her eyes were blue. She was missing one of her front teeth, dark hole hiding between her thin, pink lips.
The floor creaked as a man rounded the corner, following his daughter with a matching smile stretching across his lips. He paused when he saw the small, crumpled body lying on the braided rug. He looked up and seemed unable to correlate Natasha's silent figure and smoking gun with that of his dead daughter's body. His eyes met Natasha's when she pressed the trigger again, bullet squeezing from the barrel of her silenced Glock 26 with a sound almost like a sneeze and marking his forehead with a black spot in exactly the same position it had his daughter's, one and a half inches below the hairline.
His body hit the carpet with a muffled thump. The brightly wrapped parcels in his arms scattered on the floor beside to him. One, a gift bag, dislodged its purple tissue paper over his chest, revealing the delicate hand of a china doll with yellow curls of hair. Blood slowly leaked from the hole in his forehead and trickled down the side of his nose behind his glasses.
The milk from the glass the little girl had been carrying soaked into her baby blue bathrobe. Brightly frosted cookies lay crumbled on her stomach. A gingerbread man stared at Natasha with mournful gumdrop eyes, its left leg broken. For a fraction of a second Natasha wondered who they were for before she recalled, the memory emerging from an uneasy dream halfway between sleep and consciousness, the jolly, rosy-cheeked Saint Nikolaos. Blood had begun to tangle in the little girl's blond hair.
She was perhaps seven or eight years old. At that age Natasha had already had her first kill. A girl named Vasilisa who'd had dust colored hair and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and slept on her right side with her knees drawn up to touch her chest, two beds down from Natasha. She had attempted to steal Natasha's apple during lunch. Fresh fruit was rare in the Red Room.
The little girl's hand lay next to her head. Already tendrils of blood were beginning to lick the white skin, palm upward, fingers curled, nails painted with purple polish and sparkles. Natasha slid her gun smoothly into her belt and turned noiselessly on her toes.
It was snowing outside. And cold. Natasha pulled her hood up and zippered her jacket over her chin to guard her face against the harsh wind that tore at her hair and skin. The bells of the church had just begun to toll, clambering against the stone walls of the surrounding buildings, and Natasha didn't bother to wonder what was her name.
*****
"I'm sure you must be weary, dear, with soaring up so high;
Will you rest upon my little bed?" said the spider to the fly.
"There are pretty curtains drawn around, the sheets are fine and thin,
And if you like to rest awhile, I'll snugly tuck you in."
"O no, no," said the little fly, "for I've often heard it said,
They never, never wake again, who sleep upon your bed."
"The Spider and the Fly" by Mary Howitt
July 29, 2008. Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The air was hot and heavy and seemed to stick to her lungs as she breathed, tickling her nostrils with the smell of gasoline and cigarette smoke. Her hair was matted to her forehead, covered in a thin film of sweat which enclosed the rest of her body like a shroud, silk sheets sticking to her bare legs as if with glue, collecting under her armpits in pools, and dripping tepidly down the back of her neck, making it difficult to distinguish from the blood that oozed over her chest and arms.
Smoothly, delicately, precisely she rolled the heavy body of Fredric Delacroix off of her and slipped out of the bed, bare feet landing lightly on the soft carpet. She swiped at a lock of hair that had fallen into her eye, leaving a trail of blood on her forehead.
Colorful, rustic landscapes of Brazilian mountains watched her from the wall. A fly buzzed against the closed window that overlooked the city, masked in white lace drapes that filtered the harsh sunlight lingering outside.
She wiped the blade of her knife on the already blood-soaked sheets that had once been pure white. Blood dribbled down her stomach, ringing her navel and running toward her thigh. She crossed the room swiftly to the open bathroom door which she didn't bother shutting as she reached for the faucet. She turned the water all the way to cold, leaving bloody fingerprints on the shining metal handles.
Natasha specialized in intimate kills, luring her prey expertly with a coy look between flickering eyelashes, a caress just so with the tip of her fingers over a jaw dusted with whiskers, only to be caught blissfully unaware in her sticky web and feel the keen sting of her bite.
She placed her blade on the ledge of the sink. After washing her hands, carefully scraping the blood out of her fingernails, she grabbed a wad of paper towels and wet them under the running water. She mopped up Delacroix's blood that stained her bare breasts and stomach, turning the towels pink. The cool water felt good on her hot skin. She tossed the towels into the garbage bin and wet another wad, dabbing at the back of her neck.
She tossed cold water over her face, not shutting her eyelids and feeling her mascara sting her eyes. She should have worn waterproof makeup. It had already been running because of the sweat.
She looked in the mirror above the sink that reflected the marbled tile of the wall behind her, the mosaic fish with scales of blue and green hanging behind her head. She had never had much patience for flippant decoration. Wasting time and resources on ornamentation was an abstract concept for her, crafted for people with faraway interests and lives.
Many things were abstract concepts. Mother. Father. Friend. Regret. Affection. All there had ever been, vibrant and inerasable was the concept of enemy. Her face looked smooth and unconcerned reflected back at her in the mirror. It seemed to her now, fleetingly, that the enemy bore her same hair and eyes, assumed the identical curve of jaw and narrow cheekbones. She hadn't even flinched, feeling her blade break his skin and burry itself further into his chest while he heaved and gagged, eyes widening under her careful gaze.
The sharp crack of knuckles on the door recoiled through the room like a gunshot. Her knife was back in her hand. The leather handle felt slick in her wet palm. The hall door opened into the bedroom. Natasha heard the sound of polite footsteps padding on the thick carpet. She heard the gasp of shock and horror as whoever it was discovered Delacroix's body lying on the bed in a pool of blood of vivid scarlet. Natasha stepped around the bathroom doorway and chucked the knife in one fluid motion, a mere flick of her wrist, tossing end over end in a neat spiral and embedding itself in the copper-colored throat of the maid standing in the doorway, eyes puddles of dark chocolate and wide in terror, not even looking at Natasha.
Blood spattered the maid's white apron and pimply cheeks. A strangled sound issued from her open mouth as she choked on the blood that burbled up her throat and out of her lips. She dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut and Natasha crossed the room in three strides, stepping over the body of the maid who was still twitching reflexively on the carpet, and snatching hold of the nob of the door that led to the hallway to hastily swing it shut, more conscious of the fact she was still naked than the girl's body leaking blood in front of the open door. The maid's cart was sitting in the hallway, clean sheets and towels folded on top. They must have forgotten to hang the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. A rookie mistake. She should have known better.
Natasha recovered her knife from the throat of the girl without looking at her still open eyes. She might have been sixteen. She went back to the bathroom, realizing she'd left the faucet running.
Natasha had seduced her first mark at sixteen. She'd shot him in the back before he'd even finished taking off his trousers. A clean kill, cleaner than today's. No collateral damage. Natasha liked things neat.
She shut off the water and wiped the knobs carefully. She padded back over to the side of the bed, where Delacroix's blood was creeping over the sheets in rivulets emulating the tide of an ocean soaking into the sand, ebb and flow rushing in her ears like her breathing, chest rising and falling with the sound of sawing wood. He was lying chest down on the bed. His face was pressed into her pillow. Had he still been breathing he might have been able to smell a trace of her perfume on the pillow. She recalled the feel of his hairy chest, sticky with sweat, against her own soft skin and repressed a shudder. She was glad he was dead.
She picked her dress off the floor and yanked it over her head, struggling to pull the tight and stretchy material over her still-wet skin. She ran her hands through her hair to flatten it, slipped her knife back into its holster around her thigh, and fastened her strappy sandals back around her ankles. She popped the mint that had been on his pillow into her mouth to wash out the taste of ash on her tongue. She hated men who smoked. Her gums felt like sandpaper.
Clasping her diamond choker back around her throat she crossed the room to the door, six-inch heels sinking into the carpet. She avoided stepping in the blood that leached onto the floor from the maid's throat. She was young. Maybe sixteen. Natasha had already been doing a job a week by then.
The lock clicked like the cocking of a gun as she stepped into the hall and shut the door firmly behind her. She wondered how long it would take them to find the bodies and rang for the elevator, coolly observing the elevator boy with tan skin, gold and white uniform, and eyes that strayed to the diamond pendant nestled in her cleavage displayed by the low neckline of her dress. He was young, too. She wondered if he'd known the maid. Surely he saw her in the morning and through her rounds, knew her well enough to exchange nods and smiles, perhaps addressed each other by first names.
The sun beat down on the top of her head and burned the pale skin exposed in the part of her hair. It reflected off the mirror-like windows of the skyscrapers around her. Taxi's screeched and honked their horns in the streets. The sidewalks were clogged with vibrant clothes, faces, and conversations, street sounds and jabbering voices blending in the back of her head until in formed a cadence in which she walked, giving her grace enough to ignore the pulsing beat of her heart beneath her breast.
She'd keep the necklace. Delacroix had insisted, after all.
She peeled off the sidewalk into an alley where she'd left her drawstring knapsack with a change of clothes and a granola bar under a loose brick in the wall of the drycleaners. She downed the granola bar in two swallows, squinting against the sunlight gleaming off the lid of a dumpster bulging with black trash bags. The alley stank of garbage and urine. She wished she'd packed a bottle of water. She could still smell the rusty metal scent of Delacroix's blood in her nose.
She was pulling on a pair of shorts when she heard the crackle of a pebble behind her. In an instant, she'd turned, knife firmly in her palm, already raised to shoulder height. Sweat had again begun to slip down her temples, over her jaw and off her chin. It hung in a bead off the tip of her nose.
A man wearing a slick jumpsuit of black leather stared at her levelly at the end of the alley, blond hair erect and forehead shining with sweat in the sunlight, eyes a mixture of gray and blue and green like the murky water of the Rio Grande. For a moment all she could think was whether or not he was warm in all that black leather. She registered like a shot of a pistol that he was carrying a quiver and bow, arrow of which was trained on her nose.
Well damn she thought, clearly and precisely, and pondered if it was the same thing her own victims thought, before they felt the bite of her blade or heard the crack of her gun, if they ever had any time to think at all. She wondered if she might pitch her knife between his eyes before he let his arrow fly and found with no real surprise that she really didn't care to try.
His eyes left hers for a moment, lingering over her left hand, which was still clutching the fly of her denim shorts. She wondered how long he had been watching, first waiting for her to come back, later watching her undress.
"Well," he said, voice bouncing across the sultry Brazilian air. "I'll admit. You've got spunk. I like that in a woman."
She smirked, admiring the taught, sculpted muscles in his biceps and the way the sunlight glinted off the well-filed point of his arrow and sheen of sweat above his upper lip.
"Let me guess, they call you Robin Hood."
"Close." He matched her smile, eyes joining hers again in a way that told her with assurance that he knew exactly what they called her. His fingers plucked the string of his bow as delicately as he might those of a guitar. "But not quite."
******
March 2, 2009. Yerevan, Armenia.
Natasha met Barton in the alley between an ancient stone library and a Pizza Hut. Her heart was pattering against her ribs but she wasn't even breathing hard. Neither was Barton.
He nodded to her briskly and she answered him with a nod of her own. She didn't have to ask him whether or not Namazi was now dead. He adjusted the buckle of his quiver over his shoulder.
"Any luck locating the package?" he asked her.
"No," she tried not to let her frustration seep through her voice. The chill air prickled against her skin and breath steamed from her mouth, rising and dissipating into the air in front of her face. "He can't have already planted it."
Barton nodded in agreement, "We've been watching him too carefully -"
His words were cut off by a rumble that rapidly grew into a roaring, crackling explosion that rang through the streets and rebounded off the patchwork of buildings both of the old and new world. Fragmented screams erupted down the street, carried on the dry, cold air.
"Damn," said Barton, word leaving his mouth with a puff of white breath.
Package delivered. Natasha and Barton had been partners for almost a year now. By now there was no longer any need for words or exchange of looks to know he'd kicked into a sprint right beside her, both headed toward the direction of the explosion.
Cars and trucks skidded to a stop in the road. Pedestrians were running, some toward, and some away from the hum of chaos coming from down the street. Natasha saw smoke rise above the tops of buildings, blending with the murky gray clouds that clogged the sky. Skeletal trees that would no doubt bloom lush in the spring lined the sidewalk and reached their naked branches up to the sky like the imploring arms of the dead.
The crowd of people was growing thicker and more animated. Clattering footsteps pounded on the pavement splintered with potholes and cracks from the past winter. Barton ran two steps in front of Natasha, pushing off shoulders and squeezing through gaps in the throng. Natasha slid neatly after him, using the spaces created in his wake for her path. Sirens wailed in the distance. Her eyes zeroed in on individual aspects of the crowd, the red traffic light reflecting off a man's glasses, the freckles covering a woman's nose, a silver zipper of a blue windbreaker, the dark curls of hair on a child's olive forehead. She could smell the smoke on the air now.
Barton skidded to a stop in front of her and she dodged so she wouldn't ram into his back. He'd made his way to the front of the crowd, blocked by a wrought iron fence marked with a wooden sign reading Հիվանդանոց. Billowing smoke and flames leapt from the crumbling brick windows and walls of the building before them. Distant figures darted out of the double doors. Alarms screamed over their heads. Natasha could see uniformed policemen shouldering their way through the crowd.
"What was it?"
"A bomb."
"My God."
Snatches of panicked conversation flurried through the air and drifted into Natasha's ears. She was unable to focus on any one voice, any one face, sound or feeling.
"Looks like it hit the children's wing."
The words were spoken in Russian but Natasha could tell, by the way Barton's eyes widened, that he had understood just a clearly as she had.
Her foot broke forward without her consent. Her fist wound around a bar of the low fence and she vaulted neatly over it rather than waste time looking for a gate. Her feet landed on the yellowed lawn. It seemed to her that she could see a dead child lying in front of her, at the base of the hospital's brick wall, empty hand lying open on a braided carpet.
Oh, but she'll never find me here. And if you let me stay I'll keep house for you. I'll wash and sew and sweep and cook.
She heard Barton's heavy footfalls land on the ground as he followed her over the fence and sprinted with her toward the hospital.
"Romanoff, wait -"
Natasha did not pause to heed Barton's voice, but pelted up the flight of stairs that led to the front doors, jostling panicked health-workers and patients fleeing from the building, coughing and crying and eyes empty and haunted.
Inside there was pandemonium. Doctors and nurses rushed through the halls, some carrying litters or pushing wheelchairs. Sirens keened in the background. Smoke clogged the halls. Screams of pain and fear crashed against Natasha's ears. She heard the sound of tinkling glass and saw the clear contents of an IV flask spill across the floor, spreading through the cracks of the linoleum floor like the edges of a puzzle.
Natasha's eyes zeroed in on the door marked Սանդուղք and flung it open to reveal a flight of stairs, on which more people were clattering down, arms thrown over their mouths to stop themselves from inhaling the swelling smoke, some nursing fresh injuries, others old.
Natasha pounded up the stairs against the tide, jostled by shoulders and palms, sucking in her stomach and pressing against the rough brick wall to allow a stretcher bearing an elderly woman to be carried by.
Barton was still behind her, obstructed by the crowd blocking the stairwell. The smoke was getting thicker. Natasha's eyes were streaming.
The door was open on the third floor, letting in more people with more obvious wounds onto the stairs, blood streaming from a forehead and a shoulder, an arm twisted at an unnatural angle, hands carrying an unconscious, blood-covered child. Natasha pushed her way through the door and broke away from the mob, shoes smacking flatly against the floor as she darted down the hallway.
Black smoke made it difficult to see. She could hear more screaming now, sobbing, wailing, yelling. She saw yellow and red flames flickering ahead like rippling water and she ran faster, breath scraping up her throat painfully.
"Romanoff! This isn't our job! What the hell do you think you're doing?" Barton's footsteps pounded on the polished linoleum floor as he caught up to her. His fingers seized Natasha's wrist and swung her roughly right about to face him.
She used her own momentum against him and instinctively the heel of her hand found his forehead. Her knee came up to burry itself in his in his abdomen. She twisted and yanked her arm all in one motion and his fingers slid away from her wrist. He reacted in kind, grunt of pain seeping through his lips from the blow of her knee even as his own open palm swung upward toward her face. She ducked and he took advantage of her distraction, fingers closing again on her forearm, biting into her flesh.
His eyes found, caught, and held her own, steely gray that burned orange from the reflecting light of the fire. She didn't know who he was. She didn't know who she, herself, was. Smoke swirled around his head like the halo of a demon. She became aware of the heat, a pulsing, living thing that pressed against her chest and threatened to suffocate her. Natasha thought hell must be as red and hot as this.
And then, above the roaring flames, sirens, and distant screams, above it all, clear, and plaintive rose the keening cry of a child. Barton's fingers loosed around Natasha's arm. She whipped back around, eyes searching the thick smoke. She felt Barton's heavy, warm body behind her. Their footsteps beat a matching rhythm upon the floor, moving seamlessly as one.
Natasha clattered through a half-demolished door into a large ward lined with beds. The far wall was already crumbled and licked with flames. Half the ceiling had been blown off in the explosion, letting in a stream of cold air from outside that did war with the smoke and flame, swirling where they met in a whirlpool of black and white and red.
"Get out!" Barton yelled between wracking coughs to a woman wearing a nurse's uniform, eyes wet and round, untangling a child from its bedsheets with shaking fingers. "Take him and get out!"
Natasha inhaled and felt her own lungs clog with smoke, gasping and retching for nonexistent oxygen. She felt heat on her face as she ran to another bed and bundled the waiting child into her arms. The child clung to her neck with wiry arms. She could hear its shrill screaming in her ears.
The far wall collapsed under the raging fire onto a row of beds. Natasha had not been able to see through the smoke whether or not they had held more children, now buried in burning rubble. Barton was carrying his own child, its face buried in his chest.
"Romanoff! Let's go!" He bellowed to be heard over the roaring, hungry flames.
Natasha turned to leave but motion caught the corner of her eye. She saw the sheets move on a bed close to the fire, churning and twisting as they fought to disgorge the child within them. The child rolled off the bed and landed on the floor. It struggled to its feet.
Natasha stumbled forward to meet it, seeing gentle confusion in its strangely fearless brown eyes. It seemed to Natasha that she could see herself reflected in those eyes, a distant black figure with red hair that matched the angry flames. Red and yellow light rippled across the child's pale, innocent face.
"Romanoff -"
The flames consumed the child, shielding its writhing body from Natasha's eyes. The heat spiked on the point of a knife until Natasha could feel her cheeks burning. The child in her arm was squirming and shrieking. Natasha was unable to tell if the wetness on her neck was from the child's hot tears or blood.
Natasha remembered abruptly that her parents had died in a fire. It was a thought she could not remember ever thinking before. It was something she should have forgotten long ago. Something that should have died with her when Natalia Romanova had died and Black Widow had been reborn from the ashes. Her past was a puzzle, some pieces were faded and torn, others jammed into spots they didn't quite fit, still others missing entirely. But it was true. In a flash she knew it was true and it seemed to her that she could hear their distant, unfamiliar voices wailing, carried on the same noxious smoke that brought the screams of dying children.
"Romanoff we - can't -" Barton gasped, fingers touching her arm again, much softer this time. "There's nothing -" She didn't know whether or not he had seen the child vanish under the flames.
The fire mounted and reared like a vicious beast, swallowing everything in its path. She tore away, dragged her wrist from Barton's fingers, and tumbled back out of the ward. The ceiling above them creaked and swayed. There was a splintering, grinding sound and a beam of wood detached from the rafters, bringing with it a shower of glowing red embers like fluttering confetti or colorful fireworks.
Natasha heard Barton grunt in pain as the beam collapsed on his shoulder. Flames licked up the wood, sizzling angrily as it stroked his hair. He was hunched over, using his body to shield the child in his arms. Natasha sprang forward, arm loosening around her own child in order to curl around the beam of wood. She felt the flesh of her hands and forearm scald as she yanked at the beam at the same time Barton hoisted himself back to his feet.
Smoke swirled and flames buckled in the air. Natasha and Barton sprinted flat out down the hallway, unable to see from side to side because of the smoke, dodging obstacles of collapsed walls and charred medical equipment, stretchers, broken bedposts, and shattered glass that reflected the crimson flames. All Natasha could hear was the pained screaming of the child against her chest, rattling inside her ribs, small and thin and delicate, writhing in her arms as though it wished for her to release it into the air. Tongues of flame flailed in the hall behind them and fumbled for Natasha's flying heels. They reached the staircase that was now empty and hallow, walls charred black. The stairs rattled and clanged as they pelted downward. The banister swayed dangerous. The door was eaten behind them by leaping flames.
They clattered into the smoke bathed lobby, still swarming with medical personnel. Firefighters were streaming through the doors, wearing opaque masks that hid their faces from the smoke and dragging thick hoses that looked like heaving, twisting snakes.
Natasha followed Barton's wide shoulders, on which his quiver of arrows still clung, lopsided now as one of the buckles had been knocked loose. Some of the fletchings had caught fire and burned away, leaving nothing but the spidery skeleton of the feathers. He pushed past a pack of firemen and tripped down the stairs. Natasha followed, rush of cold air stinging her scorched face like an open palm slap. She blinked in the sudden brightness caused by the absence of the smoke, even though the sky was still overcast.
Blinking, whirling lights that belonged to the emergency vehicles scattered on the lawn twisted across her vision and disoriented her. Police and firemen and medical personnel were scattered about, all running, all shouting. Sirens keened, now mere background noise, blending in with the shrieking of the child into Natasha's ears, the crackling of the burning building behind them, the gushing of the water from the fire hoses, and prattle of voices from the watching pedestrians.
Natasha veered away from Barton, approaching a dazed looking doctor with soot in his hair. He reacted to her and the child in her arms mechanically, reaching up with tender, nimble hands to relieve her of the screaming, trembling child who did not want to let go. Its fingernails left deep welts on Natasha's neck as the doctor pulled it away. She was glad its eyes were screwed shut in its terror and pain. She didn't want to see herself reflected in its black, mirror-like pupils.
Barton was still carrying his own child, which looked stiff and motionless in his arms. His eyes were dark and hard, almost lost. A woman carrying a red cross bag rushed over to him, but Barton shook his head. Natasha could tell by the deep lines etched by the sides of his mouth that the child was dead. He seemed reluctant to let go of the body.
Natasha pulled herself away from the crowd. She felt herself drift away on the smoke rising into the air, floating far above the piecemeal stone and cement buildings and surrounding fields of dead grass, mingling with the leaden clouds above them. Her throat and lungs ached, scraped raw and parched by the smoke. Ash, the smell and taste of it, was all around her. Her fingers were red and covered with shining burns.
The grass crackled under her knees. She could not recall making the decision to kneel. She did not know how to pray.
The frozen ground felt hard and cool, seeping through the scorched fabric of her spandex leggings. She tangled her fingers in it and closed her eyes, breathing deeply the cold, crisp air that stung her lungs and throat and dried the tears on her lashes to a sticky, grainy film. The white-capped Caucuses cast a shadow over the lawn and the near parking lot speckled with cars with rusty license plates, all covered with the faint, flickering glow of orange flame and dark, drifting clouds of smoke.
One of the girls in the Red Room had grown her left index fingernail long and filed it to a point sharp enough to slice her victims' throats. She had once almost speared Natasha's eye during a sparring session. Natasha had snapped the girl's shin as simply and effortlessly as cracking a branch over her knee. Her yells had echoed across the courtyard until they'd been silenced by the heel of the warden's shoe carefully crushing her windpipe. Natasha had been made to suffer a week without food afterward. Mercy, like love, was for children.
Natasha had been eleven.
Natasha heard the grass crunch under Barton's shoes as he approached, unnaturally keen eyesight routing her out from between the press of frantic bodies.
"We need to go."
She looked up at him from the ground. Natasha wondered where he'd put the dead child. The left arm of his uniform had been torn. The skin exposes beneath it was an angry red.
Natasha absentmindedly gripped her wrist, massaging her skin. She had never understood why they had been cuffed in at night. To prevent escape? It was the most natural explanation except for the fact that Natasha could not remember ever actually wanting to leave.
"Romanoff, we should go."
The tips of his hair were singed black, face stained with soot, shoulders dusted with white ash like the snow-tipped mountains looming above them. The air was clean and cool. Natasha tasted smoke and blood in her mouth. She could still smell the burned hair of the child she had carried out of the hospital to safety.
"Dammit, Romanoff!" Barton's voice exploded from his lips, fist clanged against the metal post of the fence surrounding the parking lot. "We can't stay here."
She looked away, back to her fingers tangled in the yellow grass. The nail of her middle finger had almost entirely torn away. Blood slipped down her finger and caught in the wrinkles of her knuckles. She turned her hand over, tracing the thin stripes of blood that wound through the lines in her palm.
"Dammit!" Barton yelled again. Fist clanging against the post again. Natasha wondered if he was remembering the dead weight of the child in his arms. She wondered if the child's body had been warm or cold by the time he'd relinquished it. She wondered how many dead children Clint Barton had ever seen, touched, held, if he had ever mourned any of them before now.
The cold air embraced her shoulders like the arms of a lover and silently, methodically she named them in her head. Gerardo Maldonado. Frederic Delacroix. Jillian Underwood. Robald Charleston. The old woman wrapped in a knitted shawl who smelt of peppermint and Tabaco. Annemarie Donati. The homeless man with the gray hat and dirty nails. The two nameless henchmen in navy suits with matching ties. Melanie. The woman in green. Imogen Wilkerson. The taxi driver. Dreykov. Adam Riley. Rosa Burke. Vasilisa. She remembered all their faces if not their names, all their eyes, all their voices. The same voices that crowded into her ears and blended into those of innocent, ignorant pedestrians on the streets, the same eyes that watched her from behind newspapers and through windows in passing cars, out of mirrors set into cracked, faded wallpaper.
By now she could not remember the exact number.
"Natasha?" Something in Barton's voice changed, became a coarse whisper more poisonous than any curse. His rough fingers touched her shoulder, gently, almost tentatively as though he was afraid she would strike him. She realized she was trembling. She wondered how much of her own blood she would have to shed to wash away her multitude of sins, etched into her arms in dull pink scars and purple bruises and powder burns from her pistol.
She could no longer remember all the reasons. She wondered if there ever were any reasons. She wondered if there were even any now. She knew Barton had thought the same because she'd heard his uneven breathing at night and felt the sweat on his forehead under the beds of her fingers. She could feel his own fingers quivering on her shoulder, uniform so thin it was almost as if his flesh rested on her own.
She stared at the metal post that rose from the ground and her hand rose to touch Clint's, resting on top of the back of his fist, winding her fingers around his wrist, trying to work warmth back into his dry and cold skin.
Natasha wondered how she had known to aim waist high, why her bullet did not fly harmlessly over the little girl's head, down the hallway, and embed itself in a mirror that reflected her calm, emotionless, black-clad figure as the little girl's body dropped out of the way, pale face tarnished in blotches of red, green, blue, and yellow lights from the Christmas tree standing in the corner of the sitting room with hand-made ornaments hanging from its bows.
"I still don't know her name." Her words tasted like acid and burned on her tongue.
She hadn't even had the decency to find out her damn name.
Her fingernails dug into Clint's wrist until they broke skin and made him bleed. Clint choked on a hiss of pain but didn't pull away. Natasha wondered why he didn't pull away. His blood slithered between her fingers. She shut her eyes hard.
It seemed that the tattoo of her heart in her chest mirrored the patter of a child's feet on a carpeted floor. It was one of the many sounds, joining the wailing of a widowed wife, the gurgling of blood up a throat, the tap of point shoes on a stage, which dodged and crept through her nightmares. Natasha could feel sweat collecting on the palms of her hands and behind her knees.
She remembered now, clearly, vividly, a memory bathed in crimson light flashing off a gap-tooth smile, the sound of the child's footsteps approaching down the hall. She could remember consciously, deliberately, dismissively deciding to aim where she did, one and a half inches below the hairline.
Above them the heavily laden clouds finally expelled their pockets of snow, which blew over the dead grass, the burning hospital, the yelling firefighters, and crying children, impossible to discern from the ash that leapt from the flames. All of it floated down to cover Natasha's bent shoulders, coating her red hair in a sheet of white.
Fin
Ending Note: I've always been drawn to characters of ambiguous morality, so Natasha was a natural choice for my first story. I honestly didn't intend for this to become a "how Clint made a different call" story because it seems like everyone does those, but then my pen carried me where it willed and I ended up having very little choice in the matter.
I hope you enjoyed it. Please, consider dropping a comment if you did. Thank you for reading. (Also find this on ff.net and AO3)